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Brightman, Edgar Sheffield, 
1884-1953. | 
Immortality in post-Kantian | 
idealism / 





Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2022 with funding from 
Princeton Theological Seminary Library 


https://archive.org/details/immortalityinposOObrig 


Ingersoll Lectures on Immortality 


IMMORTALITY AND THE NEw TuHEopIcy. By 
George A. Gordon. 1896. 

HuMAN ImmorTALITY. Two supposed Objections 
to the Doctrine. By William James. 1897. 
Dionysos AND IMMORTALITY: The Greek Faith 

in Immortality as affected by the rise of Indi- 
vidualism. By Benjamin Ide Wheeler. 1808. 
THE CONCEPTION oF ImmoRTALITY. By Josiah 
Royce. 18099. 
Lire EVERLASTING. By John Fiske. 1900. 


SCIENCE AND ImmorTALITY. By William Osler. 
1904. 

THE Enpitess Lire. By Samuel M. Crothers. 
1905. 

INDIVIDUALITY AND ImmorTALITY. By Wilhelm 
Ostwald. 10906. 

THe Hope or Immorrtatity. By Charles F. 
Dole. 1907. 

BUDDHISM AND ImmMorTALITY. By William S., 
Bigelow. 10908. 

Is_ImmortTALiTy DESIRABLE? By G. Lowes 
Dickinson. 1g09. 

Ecypt1an CONCEPTIONS OF ImmorTALITY. By 
George A. Reisner. rou1r. 

INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY IN THE SONNETS 
OF SHAKESPEARE. By George H. Palmer. ror2. 

METEMPSYCHOSIS. By George Foot Moore. 1914. 

PAGAN IDEAS OF IMMORTALITY DURING THE EARLY 
ROMAN Empire. By Clifford Herschel Moore. 
1918. 

Livinc AGAIN. By Charles Reynolds Brown. 1920. 

IMMORTALITY AND THEISM. By William Wallace 
Fenn. 1921. 

IMMORTALITY AND THE MODERN MIND. By Kirsopp 
Lake. 1922. 

THE CHRISTIAN FAITH AND ETERNAL Lire. By 
George E. Horr. 1923. 

THE SENSE OF IMmorTaALity. By Philip Cabot. 
1024. 





IMMORTALITY IN 
POST-KANTIAN IDEALISM 


LONDON : HUMPHREY MiLFORD 


OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 


Y 
The Ingersoll Lecture, 1925 


Immortality in 
Post-Kantian Idealism 


BY 


EDGAR SHEFFIELD aaiaenas 


BORDEN PARKER BOWNE PROFESSOR OF 
PHILOSOPHY IN BOSTON UNIVERSITY 





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HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS; - 


| 
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CAMBRIDGE | = 
1925 | 


Lie Pe ET 
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COPYRIGHT, 1925 
BY HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS 


PRINTED AT THE HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS 
CAMBRIDGE, MASS., U.S.A. 


THE INGERSOLL LECTURESHIP 


Extract from the will of Miss Caroline Haskell Ingersoll, who died in 
Keene, County of Cheshire, New Hampshire, Jan. 26, 1893 


First, In carrying out the wishes of my late beloved 
father, George Goldthwait Ingersoll, as declared by him 
in his last will and testament, I give and bequeath to 
Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., where my 
late father was graduated, and which he always held in 
love and honor, the sum of Five thousand dollars 
($5,000) as a fund for the establishment of a Lectureship 
on a plan somewhat similar to that of the Dudleian 
lecture, that is — one lecture to be delivered each year, 
on any convenient day between the last day of May and 
the first day of December, on this subject, ‘“‘the Im- 
mortality of Man,” said lecture not to form a part of 
the usual college course, nor to be delivered by any 
Professor or Tutor as part of his usual routine of in- 
struction, though any such Professor or Tutor may be 
appointed to such service. The choice of said lecturer 
is not to be limited to any one religious denomination, 
nor to any one profession, but may be that of either 
clergyman or layman, the appointment to take place at 
least six months before the delivery of said lecture. ... 
The same lecture to be named and known as “‘the 
Ingersoll lecture on the Immortality of Man.” 





IMMORTALITY IN POST- 
KANTIAN IDEALISM 


HE task of reviewing Hegel’s 
Encyclopédie was assigned to 
Herbart. The poor man did his 

best, but failed to make head or tail out 
of his Hegel, and then despairingly ex- 
pressed his mood in the words, ‘‘Solches 
Philosophiren ist als Tatsache vorhan- 
den’”’; ‘‘such philosophizing is an actual 
fact.”* To many minds of that day 
and this, the whole movement of post- 
Kantian idealism has been a brute mys- 
tery, inexplicable and impenetrable. 
Nevertheless, the idealism of the early 
nineteenth century has been a fructify- 
ing influence in the intellectual history 
of modern civilization. To investigate 
that movement is not to inquire into a 
dead past, but to seek some of the roots 


2 IMMORTALITY IN 


of the living present of our spiritual 
life; and perchance to rediscover some 
truths that the present has crowded to 
one side. The aim of our inquiry is to 
interpret the beliefs of Fichte, Schelling, 
Hegel, and Schopenhauer about human 
immortality, and to consider the signifi- 
cance of those beliefs for modern 
thought. 

The problem of immortality, it may 
be said at once, has to do solely with 
the survival of individual personal con- 
sciousness. Other conceptions are either 
not problematic or not concerned with 
immortality. That a mysterious entity 
not in consciousness, called soul, may 
forever exist is not seriously problem- 
atic; since Fichte it is almost uni- 
versally rejected as false. That our 
lives have consequences in the lives of 
others after we are dead, through he- 
redity and social influence (as long as 
others are born on earth), and that 


POST-KANTIAN IDEALISM 3 


social groups survive the passing of 
their members — these opinions are trite 
platitudes. They constitute no prob- 
lem, and, for one who troubles to con- 
sider the predictions of science about 
the future of this planet, they offer no 
immortality; they only parry for a mo- 
ment the annihilation which awaits the 
human race. Again, there is no reason- 
able doubt that traces of what we once 
were will forever be a part of the cosmos. 
Adonais “is made one with nature’’; 
true, O poet! But which do you mean? 
That 


The One remains, the many change and pass, 


or that, truly, 


The soul of Adonais, like a star, 
Beacons from the abode where the Eternal 
are? 2 


Some residue of Adonais and of us all 
will doubtless forever be in the One. 
But the sting of the problem is felt when 


4 IMMORTALITY IN 


we ask, What of the soul of Adonais 
himself? Does the individual person 
truly live or truly die? 

Every serious thinker must sooner or 
later answer yes or no to the question 
in this specific form. Yet for few think- 
ers, Plato being about the only excep- 
tion, is this problem a central one.’ 

The solution to the problem at which 
one arrives does not stand by itself, as 
some intuitions and axioms seem to do; 
it is derivative from our Welianschauung, 
our total view of the world. Our faith 
in immortality depends on our phi- 
losophy. 

Albert Schweitzer has recently shown 
afresh the need for a world view if our 
civilization is to survive.4 ‘For so- 
ciety and for the individual,” he says, 
“life without a Weltanschauung is a 
pathological disturbance of the higher 
sense of orientation.”’*> Now, one’s 
attitude toward immortality is not 


POST-KANTIAN IDEALISM 5 


reasonably determined so much by this 
or that particular fact or so-called evi- 
dence as by our orientation in the uni- 
verse. No one fact is as important as 
the whole structure of facts. The 
bricks of reality are not significant; it 
is the way the bricks are put together 
that counts. Rational faith or unfaith 
in life after death is a function of one’s 
total cosmic perspective. What of soul 
and body, mechanism and _ purpose, 
time and eternity? These questions 
can never be answered by microscopes 
or by levitations. A myopic view of 
this or that piece of evidence will never 
interpret man’s faith in life after death. 
Schopenhauer’s instinct was sound when 
he declined to pin any faith in immortal- 
ity to so-called spiritistic phenomena, 
giving as his reason “the disgustingly 
absurd and abjectly stupid world order 
that results from the communication and 
conduct of these spirits.’ ° 


6 IMMORTALITY IN 


It was one of the merits of post-Kan- 
tian idealism to see that all the great 
truths about the meaning and value of 
life are parts of a world view, and that 
every special fact or belief must be in- 
terpreted in the perspective of that view. 


I 
IQO0O-1925 AND 1800-1825 


The present year is a suitable one for 
looking back on the first quarter of the 
preceding century in contrast with the 
first quarter of our own. Both were 
periods of unrest; both, marked by 
world warfare; both, attended by 
changes in ancient civilizations and 
governments; and both, great ages of 
intellectual creation — although, in 
philosophy proper, the early eighteen- 
hundreds were incomparably greater 
than the early nineteen-hundreds. 

The intellectual climates of the two 
periods were very different; and yet 


POST-KANTIAN IDEALISM 7 


they had much in common. In both 
periods there was a revolt against the 
crass materialism of earlier thought. 
As idealism rejected the materialistic 
ideas that found expression in the 
eighteenth century, so the present re- 
jects the materialism that sprang up 
after the fall of Hegelianism, although 
it is friendly to views like behaviorism 
with materialistic affinities. 

In both periods, also, the starting- 
point and goal of thought is the inter- 
pretation of experience. Transcendent 
things in themselves, above and beyond 
all possible experience, are no concern 
of the typical thinker of either period. 
Herbart’s “reals” are the exception 
that proves the rule. “I hereby pub- 
licly declare,”’ said Fichte, ‘‘that it is the 
inmost spirit and soul of my philosophy 
that man has nothing at all but ex- 
perience, and he comes to everything 
that he reaches only by experience, by 


8 IMMORTALITY IN 


life itself.””7 This might as well have 
been written by any twentieth-century 
pragmatist, or, save for the last three 
words, by any realist. Further, both 
periods were dominated by the idea of 
evolution. The idealists foreshadowed 
in speculative thought the conception of 
evolutionary law, which was to be 
worked out in empirical detail by later 
men of science. Schelling and Hegel 
regarded development as the very law 
of the Absolute’s being; and Schopen- 
hauer taught the struggle for existence. 
Finally, in both periods there was pro- 
found interest in the interpretation of 
value experience, although in the inter- 
vening time the rapid growth of the 
natural sciences had for a while pushed 
the study of values into the background, 
and the twentieth century has not yet 
attained the rational insight into the 
significance of values, moral and re- 
ligious, esthetic and intellectual, that 
was the secure possession of the idealists. 


POST-KANTIAN IDEALISM 9 


Whatever similarities may be traced 
between the two quarter centuries, the 
difference in intellectual climate be- 
tween them is much greater than the 
resemblance. This difference may be 
brought out by the case of Herbart, 
who lived among idealists as a stranger 
in a strange land. A recent historian of 
philosophy characterizes the system of 
Herbart as “empiricism, pluralism, real- 
ism, and determinism.”* This descrip- 
tion would suffice almost as well for 
twentieth-century pragmatisms and new 
realisms as for the nineteenth-century 
Herbart. But the contrast between the 
two periods goes further than any di- 
vergence of particular doctrine; it has 
its roots in something deep and general. 
That fundamental contrast may be ex- 
pressed by saying that idealism sought 
unity, while the present seeks precision; 
or that the age of idealism was a time 
of faith in metaphysics, while the present 
is positivistic. 


IO IMMORTALITY IN 


These statements require some ampli- 
fication. Idealism, we have said, sought 
unity, while the present seeks precision. 
Idealism believed that there is rational 
unity in the universe; that without 
such unity, thought would be futile. We 
of the present are dubious about ra- 
tional unities; we are concerned with 
observation of empirical facts, for which 
technical accuracy and precision is the 
chief requisite. The modern is sus- 
picious of all absolutes. When Schel- 
ling’s disciple, Oken, calls the Absolute 
+o, the modern cries triumphantly, 
Thy speech bewrayeth thee! Zero is, 
indeed, the meaning and the value of 
the famous Absolute! 

The idealistic interest in unity was, 
however, no mere abstraction; it was 
a confidence in reason. But a certain 
distrust of reason pervades the at- 
mosphere of the present. Hegel be- 
lieved that he could show that there 


POST-KANTIAN IDEALISM II 


was reason even in the irrational.? ‘To- 
day one finds a tendency to discover 
unreason even in the rational. Hegel 
saw the cunning of reason in “that it 
sets the passions to work for itself.’’ '° 
Modern psychoanalysis sees reason at 
work for the passions and desires of the 
subconscious, and hardly dares pretend 
to the use of reason, lest it fall into 
rationalization. 

With all its confidence in reason, 
Hegelianism fell; and Weber is prob- 
ably right in holding that what dis- 
credited it was “its presumptuous at- 
tempt to withdraw the hypotheses of 
metaphysics from the supreme _Jjuris- 
diction of facts.” ** Yet its fall carried 
with it good and evil in like destruc- 
tion. Reason commanded the idealist 
to include in his vision of the universe 
the whole range of his experience, all 
facts and all values. Since the collapse 
of idealism, there has been an increasing 


12 IMMORTALITY IN 


tendency toward specialization and di- 
vision of intellectual labor, which makes 
the interpretation of the value of life as 
a whole more and more difficult. Spe- 
clalization often breeds intolerance of 
values, and even of facts that le be- 
yond the restricted field of the special- 
ist. Thus the modern gain in precision 
has been purchased at the price of a loss 
in unity. 

There is another way of stating this 
contrast between the two periods. It 
may be said, namely, that while the 
idealists had a profound faith in meta- 
physics, the present is inclined toward 
positivism. Men who believe in ra- 
tional unity strive for and have faith 
in a vision of the meaning of reality as 
a whole; that is, they are metaphysical. 
Men whose minds are meticulous rather 
than comprehensive are inclined to posi- 
tivism. It is not quite true that the 
thought of the present is avowed and 


POST-KANTIAN IDEALISM 13 


consistent positivism, yet it is true that 
many characteristic philosophies of the 
present are positivistic in temper. Phi- 
losophies of ‘‘as if,” behaviorism, views 
that seek in adjustment to environ- 
ment the panacea for all our ills, real- 
isms that confine the task of thought to 
analysis of the given, have a common 
logical affiliation with positivism, what- 
ever the system-makers may avow. 
The development of positive science, 
sociological and psychoanalytic flank 
attacks on all metaphysical beliefs (es- 
pecially on religious beliefs), and the 
intense interest in the history of ideas 
and institutions, coupled with skeptical 
indifference to their truth or validity, 
are all symptoms of current positivism. 
For a season, the human mind seems to 
have forgotten that precision without 
unity will not lead to truth about an 
interacting universe; and that the 
most subtle analysis of the given will 


14 IMMORTALITY IN 


never carry thought beyond the given 
unless. or until reason sets the results 
of analysis into relation with a view of 
the whole. 

Surveying the two periods in review, 
we may say that the points in which 
they resemble each other are, on the 
whole, friendly to faith ia immortality. 
A universe in which materialism is false, 
conscious experience is valid, develop- 
ment is a fundamental law, and there 
are values, is a universe which, thus far, 
seems to invite immortality. If it be 
also a universe of metaphysical unity, 
the basis for faith seems to be more 
substantial; but if it be a universe in 
which knowledge is restricted to precise 
information about phenomena, while 
man remains ignorant of any meaning 
in reality as a whole, its climate is too 
bleak for belief in endless life to thrive 
therein. Only hardy forms of faith can 
survive. The change, we perceive, has 


POST-KANTIAN IDEALISM 15 


been unfavorable to personal immor- 
tality. 

Whether the change has been wholly 
for the better intellectually is doubtful. 
On this point we may well suspend 
judgment until we have inquired more 
closely into certain characteristic con- 
clusions of the idealistic movement. 
Let us consider what idealism had to 
say about the metaphysics of logic, of 
value, and of personality, in order to 
interpret the place of immortality in 
the idealistic world view. 


II 


THE IDEALISTIC METAPHYSIC OF 
LOGIC 


To the casual observer, the study of 
logic might not seem to have much to 
do with faith in eternal life. Not a few 
believers have defended their confi- 
dence that immortality is true by a de- 
liberate appeal to what they regard as 


16 IMMORTALITY IN 


a higher court; an appeal to the heart 
which knows more than the head, to 
the instinct which is wiser than reason, 
or to the life which (as Lotze and James 
and Bowne believed) is more than logic. 
Not so the early nineteenth-century 
idealists. Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel 
did not look on logic as a purely formal 
science in the Aristotelian sense; but 
they regarded it as the body of princi- 
ples of true thinking about reality, and 
hence as revealing the necessary struc- 
ture of reality itself. As we must think 
about reality, so the reality must be; 
the rational is the real, and the real is 
the rational. For Hegel, therefore, a 
system of logic is a system of meta- 
physics. Logic was for him no set of 
schoolmen’s rules to be applied to any 
content irrespective of its truth; but 
rather it was the actual set of principles 
by which the spirit moves toward a 
rational mastery and possession of its 


POST-KANTIAN IDEALISM 17 


world. Logic is thus nothing apart 
from life, but is the very heart and soul 
of life. 

The importance of logic for idealistic 
metaphysics may be better understood 
if we recall Hegel’s distinction between 
Verstand and Vernunft (understanding 
and reason). The Verstand is what 
Hegel calls the abstract exercise of 
thought; it separates, defines, makes 
distinctions. The Vernunft is concrete 
thinking; it unites, brings together, 
grasps the object as a whole. The Ver- 
stand is analytic; the Vernunft is synop- 
tic. Both kinds of thinking are neces- 
sary. The work of the reason can be 
completed only after the work of the 
understanding has been done; but 
Hegel is convinced that reason is higher 
and truer than understanding as an 
interpreter of reality. 

This distinction of Hegel’s has far- 
reaching implications. If the under- 


18 IMMORTALITY IN 


standing is the guide to truth, then 
analytic method is the sole tool of 
science and philosophy; and if analytic 
method is the only sound method, the 
only sound metaphysic must be some 
form of atomism. Reality must be a 
collection of simple entities that cannot’ 
be further analyzed. Herbart, Hegel’s 
great opponent, was a partisan of the 
understanding, and arrived at the in- 
evitable atomism—a universe made 
up of many simple, unchangeable reals. 
The same logical necessity is illustrated 
in twentieth-century analytic neo-real- 
ism, which arrives at an atomism of 
neutral entities. 

On the other hand, if Hegel be right, 
and reason is the guide to truth, then 
the ultimate method of thought is not 
analytic, but synoptic.” Analysis is 
necessary but it is not sufficient. It 
must be supplemented by a grasp of the 
object as a whole if that object is ever 


POST-KANTIAN IDEALISM 19 


to be understood. The most instruc- 
tive discussion of the subject in the 
past twenty-five years, Professor Spauld- 
ing’s ‘‘Defense of Analysis,’ admits 
that there are organic wholes which 
cannot be explained in terms of the 
parts; and this fact he calls “‘a non- 
rational element in nature.” What 
Hegel regards as the very heart of true 
reason, the partisan of analytic under- 
standing regards as a baffling mystery. 
The analytic method reaches its goal 
when it finds atoms. The synoptic 
method reaches its goal only when it 
finds an organism of some sort, a gen- 
uine whole to which the atoms belong 
and from which they derive their 
meaning. ‘The understanding explains 
the whole in terms of the parts; the 
reason explains the parts in terms of 
the whole. 

The human intellect is tossed back 
and forth from atoms to organisms and 


20 IMMORTALITY IN 


from organisms to atoms. Materialism 
and much new realism in philosophy, 
associationism and all structuralism in 
psychology, and extreme individualism 
in social and economic theory, are all 
atomistic. Teleological philosophies, 
functional psychology and self-psychol- 
ogy, biological vitalism, theories which 
regard social process as genuinely co- 
operative and creative, are all organic. 

In this clash idealism has a profound 
interest. It does not reject the ato- 
mistic in favor of the organic view; 
but it regards the organic as the truer, 
because it can include the truth of 
atomism, while atomism cannot do 
justice by uniquely organic properties 
and laws. Idealism perceives that the 
capacity to understand either what 
Schelling calls “the universal organ- 
ism,’ ‘5 or any particular organism, is 
contingent on one’s logical method. 
“Ordinarily,”’ says Fichte, ‘‘one thinks 


POST-KANTIAN IDEALISM or 


of being as something static, rigid, and 
dead, the very philosophers, almost 
without exception, have so conceived 
it, even when they described it as ab- 
solute. This arises wholly from the 
fact that men have had no living con- 
cept, but only a dead one, for thinking 
about being. ‘The death is not to be 
found in being in and for itself, but 
rather in the killing gaze of the dead 
observer.” * The pre-Bergsonian Fichte 
saw clearly that tools fit only for dissec- 
tion can never discover the secret of 
life. This insight, deepened and intensi- 
fied by Hegel, is one of the most char- 
acteristic contributions of the idealistic 
movement. 

Here, it would seem, philosophy had 
taken a genuine onward step. But the 
progress of thought is rarely rectilinear; 
and the discoverers of truth often im- 
peril their discovery by their own errors 
of judgment. Fichte and Hegel chose 


22 IMMORTALITY IN 


to express their deepest insights in 
exceedingly obscure language; the 
earthen vessels that contained the treas- 
ure caused Schopenhauer to describe 
Fichte’s ‘‘Wissenschaftslehre”’ as ‘“‘the 
most senseless, and consequently the 
most wearisome book that was ever 
written,” *’ and many contemporaries 
(like Herbart) to complain about ‘“‘the 
great difficulty of the correct under- 
standing” of Hegel.*® There is also 
something almost petulant in the self- 
assurance of those writers. Fichte was 
certain that “there is only one philos- 
ophy just as there is only one mathe- 
matics’’;'® and he did not doubt 
whose philosophy it was. 

Philosophers whose chief mission it is 
to set facts in perspective often fail to 
see their own opinions in their true 
cosmic insignificance. Without the ironic 
humor that enables one to smile at his 
own earnestness even while he is most 


POST-KANTIAN IDEALISM 23 


genuinely earnest, there is danger that 
faith may turn into dogmatism, philos- 
ophy into opinionated intolerance. The 
idealists came near to this danger. 

But much more important than these 
annoying formal defects is the fact 
that the idealists, by their apparent 
indifference to empirical facts and to 
precise analyses, laid themselves open 
to just such attacks as were directed 
against them by the careful and serious 
Herbart. He felt that in Hegelianism 
everything was in confusion, nothing 
fixed. His analytic mind desired a 
logic that deals with ‘‘something given 
Audecdeinnite.’? 2°. Purthers he felt that 
the dialectic triad of the idealists was a 
form of intellectual bondage,’ and he 
proposed to free philosophy from the 
chains of idealistic systems. He did 
not realize that his attack was on the 
form rather than the substance of 
idealism; nor that his own bondage to 


24 IMMORTALITY IN 


analytic method chained him to a sys- 
tem of ‘‘reals” which were only scholas- 
tic abstractions and no concrete reality 
at all. He did, it is true, suspect that 
his method did not lend itself very well 
to.thought about God,?" but he did not 
follow out the clew that this considera- 
tion furnished him. Herbart’s failure to 
understand the logic of idealism was an 
example emulated by the predominant 
tendency of the post-Hegelian period. 
Now, this battle over organic versus 
atomistic logic is one of the decisive 
battles in the campaign for the inter- 
pretation of man’s belief in immortality. 
If merely analytic atomistic logic be the 
mind’s best instrument for attaining 
truth, the belief in immortality will 
probably be analyzed away. The con- 
sclous person will be dissipated into 
associated sensations or chain reflexes; 
the universe will be an aggregate of 
atoms; there will be no unified mean- 


POST-KANTIAN IDEALISM 25 


ing of the whole of life and no plan or 
goal for immortality. Thus the im- 
mortal person will evaporate into his 
constituent atoms, and any question 
about his destiny becomes an imperti- 
nence. If, on the other hand, synoptic 
or organic logic be the instrument of 
true thought, then the complex personal 
life of man may be a true unity; and 
the cosmos may be an organism with 
infinite functions which set a career 
for an immortal soul and provide for it 
a home. For organic logic, immortality 
is at least possible, even probable; for 
atomism, nothing is immortal but the 
atoms, and even their immortality it 
is impossible to understand. 

It may be that the idealists went too 
far in thus deducing metaphysics from 
logic; but they were sound in their 
insight that an atomistic logic can 
never interpret an organic reality, and 
that an organic logic may be tested by 
its capacity to interpret experience. 


26 IMMORTALITY IN 


Iil 


THE IDEALISTIC METAPHYSIC OF 
VALUE 


The relation between immortality and 
logic may seem somewhat less than ob- 
vious; but no one can fail to perceive 
at once that there is an intimate bond 
between a man’s theory of value and 
his attitude toward the destiny of the 
human person. When one has an- ~ 
swered the questions about the true 
nature of value and its place in the uni- 
verse as a whole, if one is thorough, one 
has already stated one’s solution of the 
problem of immortality. Is value real 
and permanent in the universe, or is it 
a passing phase of cosmic evolution? 
What is the value of conscious selves? 
Because post-Kantian idealism was 
concerned with such questions, it was 
bound to arrive at a judgment about the 
life after death. 


POST-KANTIAN IDEALISM 27 


Nineteenth- and _ twentieth-century 
philosophers are, we have found, alike 
in their recognition that philosophy be- 
gins and ends in the interpretation of 
experience. But what is experience? 
How much does it include? The ideal- 
ists were remarkable, not only for their 
broad recognition of all kinds of ex- 
perience, but also for the range and 
depth of their experiences of value.” 
Kant had shown profound interest in 
the values of the good, the beautiful, 
and the holy, as well as the true; but 
his interest was bounded by certain 
limitations. His conception of the true 
was limited by his distrust of organic 
logic (although he knew, as did Hume, 
that mere analysis yields no metaphysi- 
cal knowledge), and also by his dis- 
proportionate interest in the world of 
physical nature revealed to us by the 
senses. His formalistic ethics reflected 
only one aspect of the meaning of moral 


28 IMMORTALITY IN 


value. The third ‘Critique’ showed 
an increasing appreciation of the beauti- 
ful and the sublime; yet his own ex- 
perience of beauty in art or nature was 
relatively meagre. Throughout his life, 
Kant was interested in religion, and 
yet he seems never to have found any 
unique value in religion in addition to 
the content of the moral law. 

Kant, it is true, probably never did 
justice to his full theory of value by his 
own putting of it. His almost naive de- 
fense of immortality, for example, meant 
more than it said. It spoke only of a 
postulate. It meant the dignity of per- 
sonality and value as clews to reality. 
But Kant did not develop fully his own 
implications. 

The idealistic movement enlarged 
Kant’s conception of experience and 
deepened the interpretation of values. 
To restrict experience to sense experi- 
ence seemed absurd to Fichte. “The 


POST-KANTIAN IDEALISM 29 


first, lowest, most superficial and most 
confused way of taking the world,” says 
he, “‘is that of holding as the world and 
true existence what meets our outer 
senses.” 73 The world of sense belongs 
to the lowest order of being; the holy, 
the good, and the beautiful, to the 
highest. Nor could Hegel conceive of 
“sensuous immediacy”’ as the true life 
of the soul.*> His ‘Philosophy of the 
Spirit”? begins with the natural soul of 
the subjective spirit; rises to the ob- 
jective spirit with its social realization 
of the good in Recht, Moralitaét, and 
Sittlichkeit; and culminates in the Ab- 
solute Spirit, in which philosophy ap- 
pears as synthesis of art and revealed 
religion.” The Absolute, then, is value; 
and morality, beauty, and religion are 
the very life of the Absolute Spirit. 

This acknowledgment of the objec- 
tivity of our value experience has obvi- 
ous implications for belief in immortal- 


30 IMMORTALITY IN 


ity. If the realm of sense experience 
were the whole of knowable reality, as 
some professional empiricists seem to 
believe, there would be no ground for 
supposing life after death. But if value 
experiences give us truth about the 
structure of the universe, then the 
human spirit may have its eternal place 
in the value of the Absolute Spirit. 1t 
should be noted, also, that sense ex- 
perience lends itself more readily to the 
methods of atomistic logic, while values, 
being true wholes, can be understood 
only by what we have called organic 
logic. 

Two instances will show how fully the 
idealists were conscious of the larger 
implications of their theory of value. 

Fichte, for example, based his philos- 
ophy on moral experience, carrying out 
to the end the implications of the Kan- 
tian primacy of the practical reason. 
Ultimately, he held, the only reason for 


POST-KANTIAN IDEALISM 31 


believing in other persons and an ex- 
ternal world is an ethical one. Duty is 
the one reality on which all else de- 
pends. The world is the material of 
our duty made visible to the senses. 
God, himself, is the moral order. Moral 
value, then, is for him the key to reality. 

This confidence in moral value led 
Fichte to an eloquent defense of im- 
mortality, which stands in marked con- 
trast to the dry and formal expressions 
of Kant. The moral law, he argues, 
must be valid, and its validity means 
that there must be a rational end for 
duty. But the highest earthly goal is not 
such a rational end; “the moral law 
within us would be void and superflu- 
ous, and absolutely unfitted to a being 
destined to nothing higher than this.” 
Hence, there must be a supersensual 
world whose purposes morality pro- 
motes. It is true that Fichte does not 
conceive this heaven as lying merely 


32 IMMORTALITY IN 


beyond the grave; it is now present, 
even now we may participate in it. 
Because it is eternal, we are.” 

It may be instructive to take our 
other illustration from the opposed ex- 
treme of the idealistic camp, namely 
from Schopenhauer. We do not usually 
think of Schopenhauer as an_inter- 
preter of objective and eternal value 
in which man may participate. On the 
contrary, he is the cynical pessimist, 
who denies all value to life and says 
that God must have been tormented 
by a devil to create a world like this; 
but there is, of course, no God. Dante, 
he observes, found plenty of material 
on earth for a proper hell, not for a 
heaven. The World Will is utterly aim- 
less. Life is a wearisome swing of the 
pendulum from pain to ennui, from 
ennui to pain. His famous theory of 
love holds that there is love in order 
that the next generation may be pre- 


POST-KANTIAN IDEALISM 33 


served; it never occurs to him that there 
are next generations in order that love 
may be preserved. All goid turns to 
dross in his hands. 

And yet this side is not the whole 
Schopenhauer, although it is the better- 
known one. The other side stands in 
startling contrast to this. The world 
is utterly evil, says Schopenhauer; but, 
he adds, salvation is possible. With 
Buddhism he holds that self-will is the 
root of all evil; and that this root may 
be destroyed temporarily by objective 
contemplation of beauty, and perman- 
ently by ascetic self-denial and renun- 
ciation of existence. Face to face with 
pure beauty, “‘it is all one whether we 
see the sun set from the prison or the 
palace; we are one with the world and 
therefore not oppressed, but exalted by 
its immensity.”’ But man has not the 
strength long to sustain such contem- 
plations. Only by the way of utter self- 


34 IMMORTALITY IN 


renunciation, the very renunciation of 
existence, 1s complete salvation attain- 
able. For the true ascetic, which Scho- 
penhauer admits he was not, “the 
inner nature itself is abolished.” This 
sounds like utter annihilation; yet 
Schopenhauer teaches that our true be- 
ing is indestructible and that “if a 
single real existence were annihilated, 
the whole world would necessarily perish 
with it”; and still the world survives! 
Further, the state of the saved is de- 
scribed as ‘‘filled with inward joy and 
the true peace of heaven,” “peace that 
cannot be shaken, a deep rest and in- 
ward serenity.”” Listen to the pessimist! 
“It is the refined silver of the denial 
of the will to live that suddenly comes 
forth from the purifying flame of suffer- 
ing. It is salvation. All suffering has 
potentially a sanctifying power.” * 

It cannot be said that Schopenhauer 
arrives at a satisfactory theory of value 


POST-KANTIAN IDEALISM 35 


or of immortality. He oscillates be- 
tween pessimism and a doctrine of re- 
demption; between the indestructibil- 
ity of my real being and its annihilation; 
between my denial of the world and my 
inalienable membership in it. Yet it is 
not to be forgotten that a great mind 
which set out to deny the permanence 
of value was forced by a consideration of 
the facts of spiritual life into an ac- 
knowledgment that there is a “final 
goal,”’ and that ‘‘the meaning and end 
of life is not intellectual but moral.” *° 

Here is no doctrine of personal im- 
mortality; but the materials therefor 
lie at hand. | 

The aged Schopenhauer who could 
write the lines that follow was no mere 
pessimist. 


Aweary stand I at my journey’s goal, 

My tired brow can scarce its laurels bear, — 

And yet my life brings gladness to my soul; 

Tho’ others mocked, I have been stedfast 
Slay 


36 IMMORTALITY IN 


Such a man was intensely conscious 
of the value of individual existence. 

The idealists made other and more 
significant contributions to theory of 
value than those we have mentioned, 
but we shall pass them by. A certain 
unrealty attaches to all discussion of 
value apart from personality. Value 
is an abstraction, a mere essence, apart 
from its existence in personality; and 
no metaphysic of value is complete 
without a metaphysic of personality. 
It is around the interpretation of per- 
sonality that the battle for and against 
immortality rages; and the interpre- 
tation of personality is perhaps the chief 
interest of idealism. 


IV 


THE IDEALISTIC METAPHYSIC OF 
PERSONALITY 


We have found that the logic of idealism 
was organic rather than atomistic, and 


POST-KANTIAN IDEALISM 37 


that it recognized value as an objective 
aspect of our experienced world. Both 
of these conclusions are friendly to 
faith in immortality, yet neither de- 
mands it. The question remains whether 
Fichte and Hegel still live, not merely 
in the histories of philosophy and in the 
knowledge of the Absolute, but as im- 
mortal individuals. 

Many thinkers believe that personal 
immortality is incompatible with the 
very logic of idealism. The Absolute, 
these critics hold, surveys the birth, 
bloom, decay, and death of worlds, 
societies, and individuals. The Many 
are swallowed up in the One. Only the 
Absolute survives.** 

On the contrary, idealism is an as- 
sertion of the significance of the finite 
self. So true is this that a Santayana 
(in war-time, it is true) could describe 
German philosophy as egoism. This 
description is, of course, a caricature; 


38 IMMORTALITY IN 


no philosophy was ever less egoistic, 
more insistent on subordinating the ego 
to the whole of which it is a member, 
than was idealism. Nevertheless it is 
true that idealism is based on a recogni- 
tion of the meaning and value of indi- 
vidual personality. The ego is a sub- 
ordinate member of the Absolute; yet 
even for Schopenhauer the ego is also 
the only clew to the Absolute. Per- 
sonality is the highest expression of the 
Absolute for Schelling and Hegel at 
times when they still hesitate to call 
the Absolute itself a spirit. Now, if so 
fundamental a place be found for per- 
sonality at every stage of idealistic 
thought, the possibility of personal im- 
mortality is open. 

One great difficulty in any discussion 
of our theme is the fact that most his- 
torians of our period have not paid 
sufficient heed to their sources, but 
have either ignored the bearing of the 


POST-KANTIAN IDEALISM 39 


systems on immortality or have de- 
- duced from their interpretations of the 
systems what the philosophers should 
have believed. It is sounder historical 
method, and probably more edifying, 
to consider what the giants of those 
days thought for themselves. 

Schelling, that strange Proteus figure, 
had at first little interest in the problem 
of the value of personality, but was a 
philosopher of nature.*3 In his later 
phase, which was without influence on 
the development of philosophy, he was 
a believer in life after death. His 
‘proofs’? need not concern us _ here. 
The belief is not wholly a product of 
Schelling’s last period; traces of it may 
be found in the earlier ‘‘ Philosophie und 
Religion”? (1804) and in the dialogue 
“Clara.” Schelling showed his loyalty 
to organic rather than atomistic logic 
by rejecting the traditional proof of im- 
mortality based on the supposed sim- 


40 IMMORTALITY IN 


plicity and consequent indestructibility 
of the soul; for, said he, “the soul is no 
simple thing, but a whole.’ Finally, 
Schelling’s position is instructive be- 
cause, even in his later period, he re- 
mained pantheistic. He, at least, holds 
that -absolutism is not incompatible 
with personal immortality. 
Schleiermacher should not be omitted 
from our study. The great philosophical 
theologian has, however, only negative 
or vague ideas on the life after death. 
For him the feeling of dependence on 
God was the heart of religion, a doctrine 
which led Hegel to the famous comment 
that ‘for Schleiermacher, the dog would 
be the best Christian.’ 35 Schleier- 
macher regarded the ordinary belief in 
personal immortality as selfish. In the 
“Reden,” he teaches that the goal of 
religion is to live an eternal life here and 
now, and to lose one’s self in the infinite, 
rather than to seek personal survival. 


POST-KANTIAN IDEALISM AI 


Even in the later, more theological, 
phase of the ‘‘Glaubenslehre,”’ he dwells 
chiefly on the difficulties of belief in 
immortality. Individual immortality 
must be bodily; yet how can the celes- 
tial body resemble the terrestrialP How 
can the demand for the perfection of the 
separate individual be reconciled with 
the social demand for the perfection of 
the Church? Is perfection immediate 
or a development? His last word on 
the subject is ‘‘immer ungewiss’ — 
“forever uncertain.” %° 

Fichte stands in marked contrast to 
Schleiermacher. For him, the philo- 
sophical interpretation of belief in im- 
mortality was a life-long interest. He 
expressed in 1790 his gratitude to Kant 
for peace in this life and for hope of 
another.*’ At different stages of his 
thought he develops three main argu- 
ments for immortality. 

His first argument, formulated in the 


42 IMMORTALITY IN 


‘““Wissenschaftslehre,” may be called 
the argument from the infinity of the 
self. The I always posits a not-I as a 
limit, but this limit can be indefinitely 
extended. ‘The self,” he says, “can 
extend the object of its striving to in- 
finity:” There is literally no end to the 
possibilities of the development of self- 
hood; its infinite development can 
never be completed — and this fact is 
“the seal of its vocation for eternity.” * 

Fichte’s second argument is a form 
of the moral argument, which is worked 
out most fully in ‘‘The Vocation of 
Man” (1800), in briefer form in lectures, 
probably from 1795, which were dis- 
covered and published by Bergman a 
few years ago. The moral law is for 
Fichte the one fundamental certainty 
on which all else is based. Now the 
moral law commands endless activity 
for good; and the present state of 
humanity can therefore not be its final 


POST-KANTIAN IDEALISM 43 


vocation. Here and now, amid the 
changes of time, man may be immortal 
by the resolution to obey the laws of 
reason; but this immortality is more 
than a noble quality of life. It is an 
abiding existence, ‘‘ borne onwards, pure 
and inviolate, upon the waves of time.’’° 
The ‘‘abiding existence” is no soul- 
substance, it is true; on the other hand, 
it is no mere impersonal quality, but is 
the survival of the identity of our con- 
sciousness, as he puts it in the lectures 
of 1795. This belief is not demanded by 
the man whose needs are merely worldly; 
only the moral man conceives (or needs) 
eternity. For him, immortality is the 
activity of the identical conscious ego. 
He believes in it for no selfish reason, 
but in order to have a field for the de- 
velopment of holiness.*° The invisible 
and eternal world is ‘‘the union and 
direct reciprocal act of many separate 
and independent wills.” ** 


44 IMMORTALITY IN 


Fichte’s third argument may be called 
the mystical, and is to be found in the 
beautiful lectures on ‘‘The Way to a 
Blessed Life’’ (1806). In these lectures, 
the individual person seems to be 
merged: in) God. ‘The "expenencemra 
which Fichte appeals is still called 
morality, but instead of the assertion of 
the moral will, it is the denial of self and 
the sinking into God which is the ground 
in experience of his faith in life after 
death. ‘Not man but God acts.” 

This has been called a Spinozistic 
pantheism, in which the individual dis- 
appears. But such is not the intent of 
Fichte. In these same lectures is one 
of his most explicit affirmations of 


personal immortality. ‘This diremp- 
tion into a system . . . of egos or in- 
dividuals is a part of the . . . diremp- 


tion of the objective world in the form 
of infinity, and thus belongs to the ab- 
solute fundamental form of existence 


POST-KANTIAN IDEALISM = 45 


which is not to be annulled even by 
deity itself. As being was divided within 
deity, so it remains divided into all 
eternity. Hence nothing posited by 
this diremption, no really developed 
individual, can ever perish.’ *, The 
mystical argument, then, assures Fichte 
of the eternal place of every individual 
in the life of God. In the light of 
these passages, there can remain no 
doubt about Fichte’s position.” 
Hegel’s metaphysic of the person and 
his immortality is more difficult to in- 
terpret than is Fichte’s and there is cor- 
respondingly more difference among his 
expositors. The right-wing Hegelians 
believed that Hegel held to a personal 
God and personal immortality, while the 
left-wing group denied both. There is 
similar divergence in the judgment of 
modern commentators.“ The majority 
hold that Hegel denies personal immor- 
tality.4s Galloway has recently re- 


46 IMMORTALITY IN 


affirmed this opinion, on the ground that 
the very logic of absolutism precludes 
the survival of the self.“° The self is 
transcended, lost, annulled, absorbed in 
the organic whole; the individual does 
not survive as a separate atom or soul- 
substance. | 

Further, it has been said that Hegel 
was indifferent to the whole problem. 
So competent an Hegelian and so ear- 
nest a believer in immortality as J. M. E. 
M’Taggart held to this view, and Win- 
delband judged that Hegel had no 
direct interest in the questions of the 
personality of God and immortality.” 

In confirmation of Hegel’s supposed 
indifference to the question, his letter 
to Heinrich Beer on the death of the 
latter’s son is often quoted.‘® Hegel in 
this letter said that he did not write 
“to give you words of comfort, for I 
should not know how to express any just 
at this moment that could find room in 


POST-KANTIAN IDEALISM 47 


your grief that is so immediate and so 
fresh.” After referring to the happy 
memory of the child’s life, he goes on to 
say that ‘‘this is a moment of your life 
and its hard experience in which your 
kind and loving nature, which is of the 
utmost value in the ordinary peaceful 
current of life, now has to prove the 
inner strength of a still deeper founda- 
tion, in order to show the capacity of 
the spirit to endure even such an experi- 
ence as yours.” ‘This expression has 
been used, as we remarked, to show that 
Hegel did not believe in immortality. 
The letter does not, it is true, try to 
force the sorrowing parent’s emotions, 
or to preach to him, or to argue; yet in 
tactful sympathy it hints at a “still 
deeper foundation,” which may as well 
lie in faith as in doubt. On this letter, 
no conclusion can be built. 

Over against the majority of the 
commentators, a smaller group has 


48 IMMORTALITY IN 


held that Hegel made personality his 
highest category, the completion and 
crown of the dialectic, and that the 
Absolute Spirit implies immortal beings 
as aspects necessary to his own inner 
Dieu. 

It iS instructive to turn from the com- 
mentators to the writings of the Hegel 
who is supposed to be indifferent to per- 
sonality and its survival. This pro- 
cedure raises a question about whether 
the commentators have actually taken 
Hegel’s direct discussions of the subject 
into account. “With the idea of im- 
mortality,” he says, “‘the value of life 
increases.”’ In the religious experience, 
man, “knowing himself in God,... 
at the same time knows his imperishable 
life in God, and therefore the idea of the 
immortality of the soul here enters as an 
essential moment into the history of 
religion. ... The ideas of God and 
immortality have a necessary relation 


POST-KANTIAN IDEALISM —§ 49 


to each other; when a man knows truly 
about God, he knows truly about him- 
Bell LOO.’ 

Hegel specifically asserts that ‘‘rea- 
soned knowledge, thought, is the root of 
[man’s] life, of his immortality as a 
totality in himself. The animal soul 
is sunk in the life of the body, while 
spirit, on the other hand, is a totality in 
itself.”’ That is, the Absolute totality 
comprises man’s immortality as a per- 
sonal totality in himself. 

Religions which fail to do justice by 
the immortality of self-conscious spirit, 
he censures. Judaism, with its interest 
in One Lord, but no conception of im- 
mortality, is (in Hegel’s sense) abstract. 
“The conscious perception of the unity 
of the soul with the Absolute, or of the 
reception of the soul into the bosom of 
the Absolute, has not yet arisen.”’ 

The doctrine of Nirvana, which cor- 
responds to what many regard as the 


50 IMMORTALITY IN 


Hegelian teaching, he confutes on the 
ground that Nirvana is ‘‘not an affir- 
mative permanent duration, but... 
continuous existence in the state of anni- 
hilation of the Affirmative. This iden- 
tity, this union with Brahma, is, at the 
same ‘time, a melting away into this 
unity, which is, it is true, seemingly 
affirmative, and yet is in itself utterly 
devoid of determination and without 
differentiation. . . . This determina- 
tion of that subjectivity which is objec- 
tive, which pertains to the objective, 
namely, to God, is also the determina- 
tion of the subjective consciousness. 
This consciousness knows itself as sub- 
ject, as totality, true independent ex- 
istence, and consequently as immortal. 
With this knowledge, the higher des- 
tiny of man dawned upon conscious- 
ness.” It is hard to see how a writer 
could more explicitly show the logical 
necessity of immortality on Hegelian 
premises. 


POST-KANTIAN IDEALISM 51 


Again, in the interpretation of Chris- 
tianity, which he regards as absolute 
religion, he says that ‘‘the soul, the in- 
dividual soul, has an infinite and eternal 
quality, namely, that of being a citizen 
in the Kingdom of God.” *° 

Again, he defines the idea of immor- 
tality as ‘“‘the idea of the eternal nature 
of the subjective, individual spirit.”” He 
shows that this idea cannot arise at the 
abstract stages of nature religion or of 
the religion of the One; it can arise only 
when self-consciousness is spiritual.** 

The current opinion that Hegel denies 
personal immortality appears, there- 
fore, to be untrue not alone to his 
abundant specific assertions, but also, 
it may be added, to his organic logic. 
The view that the Absolute swallows up 
all distinctions and absorbs all finite 
persons is, for true Hegelianism, as ab- 
stract and untrue as is the opposite ex- 
treme of an atomistic personal plural- 


52 IMMORTALITY IN 


ism. ‘This we found in his critique of 
Judaism and of Hinduism. The Ab- 
solute includes all consciousness; all 
spirits, then, are members of the One 
Spirit. Metaphysical logic, Hegel 
teaches, proves personal immortality. 
Any category short of inclusive Spirit 
is inadequate. The real is the personal. 
Such seems to be the main intent of 
Hegel’s thought, despite apparent de- 
viations and obscurities. The popular 
misunderstanding can have arisen only 
by overestimating the formal outlines 
of the Absolute, the goal of the dialec- 
tic, while forgetting what for Hegel was 
the main thing, namely, its concrete 
spiritual life. No better evidence than 
this could be found for our thesis that 
the organic logic of idealism is the only 
fruitful instrument for the interpreta- 
tion of personality. 

Schopenhauer, the last survivor of 
the idealists, seems as clearly to deny 


POST-KANTIAN IDEALISM 53 


personal immortality as Fichte and 
Hegel to affirm it. The World Will is 
one; its forms are many, but they pass. 
Only the Will endures. ‘‘ Personality,” 
he says explicitly, ‘‘is a phenomenon 
which is known to us only from our 
animal nature and hence is not longer 
clearly thinkable when separated from 
tee 

In the essay on ‘‘Death,” Schopen- 
hauer makes plain that he believes that 
the personal individuality perishes in 
the article of death, and that the indi- 
vidual, who is one with the World Will, 
may willingly give up this individuality 
because he knows that the Will is the 
source of innumerable individuals. The 
good man neither needs nor desires the 
continuance of his person.” 

In the brief dialogue on immortality 
he asserts that the individual ends with 
death; that individuality is not man’s 
true essence, but rather a restriction or 
imperfection. 


54 IMMORTALITY IN 


The doctrine of Nirvana, rejected for 
its abstractness by Hegel, is espoused 
by Schopenhauer. Yet precisely at this 
point, one is surprised, as in his meta- 
physics of value, to find emerging traces 
of a positive recognition of eternal 
meaning in personality. Not only does 
Schopenhauer repeatedly assert the in- 
destructibility of the Will which is 
our essential being,’> but in the exposi- 
tion of Nirvana he hints that there may 
be some eternal destiny for which we 
lack definite concepts. ‘‘In the hour 
of death it is decided whether the man 
returns into the womb of nature or 
belongs no more to nature, but — 
for this opposite we lack image, con- 
ception, and word, just because these 
are all taken from the objectification of 
the will . . . and consequently can in 
no way express the absolute opposite of 
it, which accordingly remains for us a 
mere negation.” 


POST-KANTIAN IDEALISM 55 


What is won in the salvation of Nir- 
vana is denoted by nothing, yet a rela- 
tive, not an absolute nothing. Else- 
where he describes it as “the flower 
which proceeds from the constant vic- 
tory over the will.” °° Here it seems to 
be more specifically a spiritual quality, 
a personal experience. 

Another current of thought in Scho- 
penhauer, also inconsistent with the 
general trend of his impersonalistic pes- 
simism, is the doctrine that every in- 
dividual man is a Platonic idea, and 
hence that human individuality has a 
meaning and value that does not attach 
to other natural phenomena. Individ- 
uality, he points out, is at its highest in 
man, and is less and less in the lower 
forms of life. Every man is to a certain 
extent a “special Idea,” whereas among 
brutes only the species has any special 
significance. Further, he holds, ‘the 
intelligible character,” that is, the meta- 


56 IMMORTALITY IN 


physical reality, “‘coincides with the 
Idea.” 5’ The special significance of in- 
dividuals is thus deduced from the Idea 
in a fashion startlingly like that of Hegel. 

It is a matter of no small moment for 
rational faith in immortality that Scho- 
penhauer set out, as we have seen, to 
deny both the value of life and the 
meaning of individual personality; but 
that, while intending to hold to his nega- 
tions, he came upon facts which ex- 
torted from his unwilling lips the admis- 
sion that value is to be found in life and 
that personality is of unique significance. 


V 
CONCLUSIONS 


Our conclusion is, then, that post- 
Kantian idealism as a whole is much 
more favorable to belief in personal im- 
mortality than is commonly supposed. 
This attitude is no relic of tradition or 


POST-KANTIAN IDEALISM 57 


surrender to desire, but is the out- 
growth of a logical principle. 

As we have seen, one’s attitude toward 
immortality is fundamentally deter- 
mined by one’s world view and not by 
this or that particular fact; and the 
kind of world view one will adopt is 
largely determined by one’s type of 
logic. Idealism is based on the logic of 
the concrete universal, the conception of © 
truth (and hence of reality) as an organic 
whole. It therefore rejects both all 
exclusively atomistic and analytic logic 
and also (as the study of Hegel shows) 
every attempt to express truth in 
merely abstract universals like the One. 

Hence, in theory of value, idealism is 
opposed to any pluralistic attempt to 
find value only in specific situations or 
specific relations or adjustments of the 
individual to his environment. Such 
theories either make value a passing 
biological incident in the universe, and 


58 IMMORTALITY IN 


so destroy any ground for personal 
immortality; or else they make value 
centre and terminate in the interest of 
the individual, and thus provide, at 
best, for an atomistic and self-centred 
immortality —a belief which a recent 
neo-Hegelian writer rightly describes as 
irreligious.** 

Idealism is equally opposed to the ab- 
stract idea that only the whole is of 
value and that individuals are lost and 
absorbed in that whole. Such a view 
deprives the whole of all concrete 
spiritual meaning. If the whole is to 
have value, as idealistic logic demands, 
individuals find their value too by their 
actual eternal membership in that whole. 

The fruitfulness of the organic logic 
of idealism was also shown by its meta- 
physic of personality. An exclusively 
analytic logic will explain personality in 
terms of its parts, whether they be 
Humean impressions, or more modern 


POST-KANTIAN IDEALISM 59 


behavior segments, or realistic neutral 
entities. Such logic forbids the thinker 
to look for any real and permanent 
whole, and thus vetoes immortality in 
advance. The partisan of the merely 
abstract universal, on the other hand, 
will make personality only an adjective 
of the universe as a whole, with no true 
individuality or inner totality. But the 
organic logic of idealism shows that 
human personality is an organism within 
the universal organism, a whole within 
the whole, essential to the meaning and 
content of the whole. If not all ideal- 
ists have seen this implication of their 
own thinking, and if those who have 
seen it have at times appeared to forget 
it, the implication is nevertheless there. 

Idealism takes thinking seriously. 
Fichte seems to have prophesied against 
modern pragmatism when he attacked 
those who hold that “their person does 
not exist as a particular expression of 


60 POST-KANTIAN IDEALISM 


reason, but reason exists to help their 
person through the world.” °? It comes 
to this: if reason, as idealism under- 
stands it, is trustworthy, then immor- 
tality is a fact. If value is to be found 
in experience, even when experience is 
taken as cynically as it is by Schopen- 
hauer, and if personality is a spiritual 
whole that finds value through its own 
membership in the universal order which 
includes but transcends all human per- 
sons, there is substantial ground for 
reasonable hope of immortal life. 

Be that as it may, the case for im- 
mortality must rest on its coherence 
with the world view to which reason 
leads us. The seeker for truth about 
immortality in an age of philosophic 
confusion may take comfort from the 
optimistic words of the great pessimist, 
Schopenhauer: ‘‘The power of truth is 
incredibly great and of unspeakable 
endurance.” °° 


NOTES 


[All translations in the text of the lecture are by 
the writer unless an English translation is ex- 
plicitly referred to in these notes.| 


1. Herbart, Kleinere philosophische Schriften 
. li (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1843), 721. 

2. P. B: Shelley, Works. Globe ed. (N. Y.: 
Macmillan, 1901), pp. 427, 420, 430. 

3. See W. Osler, Science and Immortality (Bos- 
ton: Houghton Mifflin, 1904), p. 20. 

4. A. Schweitzer, Verfall und Wiederaufbau der 
Kultur (1); Kultur und Ethik (11), (Bern: Haupt, 
1923). Both volumes have been translated into 
English. 

SOP. cw. (1); Dp. 53. 

6. Werke (Reclam), iv, 348. 

7. Sonnenklares Bericht, in Werke (Berlin: 
Veit, 1845), ii, 333- 

8. F. Thilly, History of Philosophy (N. Y.: 
Holt, 1914), p. 479. 

g. See J. Royce, Lectures on Modern Idealism 
(N. H.: Yale University Press, 1919), p. 225. 

10. Philosophy of History, tr. J. Sibree (N. Y.: 
Collier, 1905). 

11. A. Weber, History of Philosophy, tr. F. 
Thilly (N. Y.: Scribner, 1904), p. 534. 

12. See the discussion of method in Chapter I 
of E. S. Brightman, An Introduction to Philosophy 
(eV tolt,:1925). 


62 IMMORTALITY IN 


13. In E. B. Holt and others, The New Realism 
(N. Y.: Macmillan, 1912), p. 241. 

14. Miss M. P. Follett, Creative Experience 
(N. Y.: Longmans, 1924), is an excellent illus- 
tration. 

15. Schelling, Von der Weltseele. Eine Hypo- 
these der hihern Physik zur Erklarung des allge- 
meinen Organismus (Hamburg: Perthes, 1798). 

16. Anweisung zum seligen Leben. Werke, v, 
LOANS 
17. The World as Will and Idea (Eng. tr.), i, 43. 

18. Kleinere philosophische Schriften, iii, 729, 
722) 

19. Sonnenklarer Bericht . . . Ein Versuch, die 
Leser zum Verstehen zu zwingen. In Werke, ii, 323. 

20. Herbart, Haupipuncte der Metaphysik (GOt- 
tingen: Danckwerts, 1808), p. 103. 

21. Uberweg, Grundriss der Geschichte der 
Philosophie (Berlin: Mittler, 1923), i iv, 174. 

22 1ULE TAs 

23. Anweisung zum seligen Leben. Werke, v, 
466. 

24. Ibid., 460. 

A Philosophy of Religion (Eng. tr.), il, 63. 

26. Part III of Encyclopédie der philoso peace 
Wissenschaften (tr. by Wallace as Hegel’s Phi- 
losophy of Spirit). 

27. Werke, v, 211, etc. Vocation of Man 
(Chicago: Open Court Publishing Co., 1og10), 
DPDHist is 2sl Atel. 

28. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea 
(tr. Haldane and Kemp, London: Paul, 1906), i, 
402, 255, 266, 494, 167, 503, 504, 507. 


POST-KANTIAN IDEALISM 63 


29. Ibid., 1, 199; il, 453. 

30. Schopenhauer, Werke (Reclam), v, 606. 

31. On the general problem, see Jesse Winecoft 
Ball, Absolute Idealism and Immortality (Ph.D. 
thesis, University of Nebraska, June, 1907). 

32. Schelling’s earlier writings; Hegel’s Phdno- 
menologie. 

33. See A. Schweitzer, op. cit. (n. 4 above), 
(47) P0123. 

34. See H. C. P. Beckers, “Die Unsterblich- 
keitslehre Schellings . . .” in Kénig.-bay. Abhand- 
lungen der Akademie der Wissenschaften, Miinchen. 
Philos.-philol. Classe, x1. (Miinchen, 1862), 3- 
112, esp. 66, 96, 100, 101. The relevant passages 
from Schelling have been faithfully collated, but 
the value of the monograph is limited by the 
simple faith of the author that Schelling’s thought, 
from its earliest to its latest phase, was ‘‘a steady 
progress” (p. 3). 

35. Cited in Uberweg, Grundriss, iv, 97. 

36. See Otto’s edition of the Reden (Gottingen: 
Vandenhoek und Ruprecht, 1920), pp. 82, 83. 
Also Der Christliche Glaube, 4th ed. (Berlin: 
Reimer, 1843), pp. 487-502. Cf. also, A. S. 
Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of Immortality (Ox- 
ford: Clarendon Press, 1922), pp. 136, 164, 165, 
and R. A. Tsanoff, The Problem of Immortality 
(N. ¥Y.: Macmillan, 1924), p. 233. 

37. C. C. Everett, Fichte’s Science of Knowl- 
edge (Chicago: Griggs, 1884), p. 8. 

38. Werke, i, 269-270. Also Everett, op. cit., 
p. Ist. 

39. The Vocation of Man, tr. W. Smith (Chi- 


64 IMMORTALITY IN 


cago: Open Court Publishing Co., 1910), pp. 113, 
II4, 141, 115. 

40. E. Bergman, J. G. Fichte iiber Gotti und 
Unsterblichkeit. Aus einem Kollegheft von 1795 
(Berlin: Reuther und Reichard, 1914). Kant- 
studien, Erginzungsheft, No. 33, pp. 28, 30, 31. 

41. The Vocation of Man, p. 153. 

42. Anweisung zum seligen Leben. Werke, v, 
518, 475, 530. Cf. 409. It is true that one may 
find an occasional uncomplimentary reference to 
personality in Fichte, as in the following passage 
from The Nature of the Scholar (tr. W. Smith, Lon- 
don: Chapman, 1848). The man devoted to the 
Idea, says Fichte, forgets himself. ‘His person, 
— all personality, — has disappeared in the Divine 
Idea of universal order. That order is his ever- 
present thought; only through it does he conceive 
of individual men; hence, neither friend nor foe, 
neither favourite nor adversary, finds a place be- 
fore him; but all alike, and he himself with them, 
are lost forever in the thought of the independence 
and equality of all” (op. cit., p. 105). That this 
passage, and similar ones, do not admit of the in- 
terpretation put on them by those who think that 
Fichte denies personal immortality and holds to 
absorption into the Absolute is evident from two 
considerations. The first is that the passage de- 
scribes an experience of a human being in this life; 
and the second is that he is not speaking of the de- 
struction of personality as consciousness, but only 
of annihilation of an undue respect for one’s own 
person (or for particular others), which is based on 


POST-KANTIAN IDEALISM 65 


“the independence and equality”’ (and therefore 
the personal distinctness) of all. 

43. Cf. The Vocation of Man, p. 147. 

44. An unpublished paper by the Reverend 
Albion R. King on “Immortality in the Thought 
of Hegel”’ (written for the Seminar on Hegel in 
Boston University, 1923-24) has collected data to 
which the text is indebted at several points. 

45. So, E. Petavel, The Problem of Immortality 
(1892), pp. 50-54; A. Seth, Hegelianism and Per- 
sonality (1887), pp. 235-238; Baron F. von 
Hiigel, Eternal Life (1912), p. 206; R. Mackin- 
tosh, Hegel and Hegelianism (1903), p. 121; W. 
Windelband, History of Philosophy (tr. 1893), 
p. 640; W. T. Stace, The Philosophy of Hegel 
(1924), P. 514. 

46. In Sir James Marchant (editor), Immor- 
tality (N. Y.: Putnam, 1924), p. 129. 

47. J. M. E. M’Taggart, Studies in Hegelian 
Cosmology, 2d ed. (Cambridge University Press, 
1918), pp. 4-55; W. Windelband, History of 
Philosophy (N. Y.: Macmillan, 1893 and later 
edd.), p. 640. 

48. Hegel, Werke, xvii, 633-634. 

49. So the St. Louis School (see the Journal 
of Speculative Philosophy, passim); J. M. Ster- 
rett, Studies in Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion 
(1890), p. 208; also T. H. Green, and the Cairds; 
cf. also, Royce and Miss Calkins. 

50. Philosophy of Religion (tr.), 1, 315, 79, 80; 
Sees allt 213,.163> 11, 2c5 >) ci. also, 111,57, 302, 
303. 


66 POST-KANTIAN IDEALISM 


51. Ob. cit., ii, 260. 

52. Schopenhauer, Werke (Reclam), iv, 219. 

53. Lhe World as Will and Idea (tr.), iii, 285, 
286, 308. 

54. “A Dialogue on Immortality,” tr. by C. L. 
Bernays in Jour. Spec. Phil., i (1867), 61, 62. 

55. Lhe World as Will and Idea, iii, 279, 281, 
282. 

56. Op. cit., iii, 427, 431; i, 506. 

57. Op. cit., i, 170, 171, 203; cf. also, 206, 207, 
290, 201. 

58. F. Brunstaid, Die Idee der Religion (Halle: 
Niemeyer, 1922), p. 303. 

59. Fichte, “A Criticism of Philosophical 
System,” tr. A. E. Kroeger, in Jour. Spec. Phil., 


i (1867), 53. 
60. The World as Will and Idea (Eng. tr.), i, 157. 








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